The BFD | The Riots That Cured a Plague

Who knew that the deadliest plague of modern times, the Black Death of the 21st century, could be stopped by riots?

After all, it was a scant fortnight ago that daring to venture outside our homes, even to take our children to otherwise empty parks was tantamount to kicking your grandmother to death. If you were so heartless as to want to go to your grandmother’s funeral, why, you might as well have beaten a nurse to death with a bloody puppy (assuming you could find a nurse who wasn’t busy recording a breathtakingly choreographed TikTok video).

So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it — by, for instance, arguing that the harms of the virus had to be weighed against the suffering from an economic shutdown and a global depression — was deemed immoral[…]

People who left their homes for any reason other than officially approved “essential” functions were — no matter how careful they were — publicly shamed if not fined and arrested.

But that was two weeks ago. Which might as well have been some time around the 9th century to the goldfish brains of the media-political elite.

Roughly two weeks ago, everything changed. Well, not everything: there’s still no cure for COVID-19, nor any treatment, nor any vaccine against contracting the coronavirus. It is still just as lethal as it was in February and still as contagious. And in many parts of the United States, the infection curve has not plateaued but instead continues to increase[…]

Nothing has really changed regarding the epidemiology, infectiousness or lethality of the disease.

But something has changed: dramatically, radically, abruptly – and hypocritically. The solemn pronouncements of “public health experts” and public authorities.

Mass stay-at-home orders and self-isolation gave way to massive street protests, where tens or hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in the U.S. and around the world, often one on top of the other, chanting, yelling and singing: a virtual laboratory for what we had spent four months hearing was exactly what one must not do in the middle of this pandemic.

And yet, in very stark contrast to the vehement denunciations from public health experts of prior protests or out-of-the-home activities of any kind, virtually no prominent experts have denounced any of this on the ground that it will spread the coronavirus and ultimately kill more people (even though that is highly likely to happen). To the contrary, many infectious disease experts have done the exact opposite[…]

Remember, the media-political elite were so absolute in their lockdown dogma that, when Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic shrieked that it was an “experiment in human sacrifice”. The celebrity lawyer who, just a few weeks earlier, was signalling his virtue by parading near-empty beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper to shame lockdown-ignoring Floridians, now posts selfies from packed protests.

But it is the public health experts whose 180-degree reversal is most stark, and — given the unique importance of maintaining trust in their apolitical scientific expertise during a global pandemic — most damaging.

The epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo proclaimed last week that[…]the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus”[…]

The former Director of the CDC and New York City Health Commissioner Tom Frieden similarly pronounced that “the threat to Covid control from protesting outside is tiny”[…]

But perhaps the most egregious and illustrative example of the utter manipulation of public health science and expertise for nakedly political ends is found in the open letter that was originally crafted by epidemiologists at the University of Washington and then ultimately signed by 1,300 experts from around the country.

These left-wing activists parading as “experts” don’t even bother to deny that the protests they are endorsing will likely cause a new wave of infections and more deaths, or that black Americans will be disproportionately affected.

This is classic, Orwellian Doublethink: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed”.

Totalitarians, as Orwell also said, set up unquestionable dogmas – and then alter them from day to day to suit the winds of political expediency. Keep all of that in mind when, as will almost certainly happen in the next week or two, faux-experts and lab-coated activists like Siouxsie Wiles yet again turn their “expert advice” on a dime.